


Rendering

by orphan_account



Category: Dollhouse
Genre: Episode: s02e13 Epitaph Two: Return, Gen, Yuletide 2011
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-24
Updated: 2011-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-27 23:25:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/301210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Topher will gift parts of himself once, perhaps best, left closed to Adelle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rendering

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chibi1723](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chibi1723/gifts).



At the end of the world Adelle sits down, her hands bent so index and thumb make a right angle, and she has very long fingers. Topher squeezes one. The fingernail shakes, minutely, like one might shake if one had been pulling someone off the edge of a cliff, and he kind of closes his teeth over it because he wants to know if there is a physical taste to salvation. She slaps him on the shoulder but there is no bite in it; he gets only the taste of her skin, very Adelle, before she withdraws her hand and shows him the arching arch of her eyebrow.

"I've an offer," he says, "A— a counteroffer, to the world seducing us with pretty mindstates, explosions." A logical way to end that list exists. His head doesn't always cooperate with him the way the chair used to, though, or the way she climbs into his escape pod and breathes for him, so he can sleep to the up-down of her stomach and wake to her still breathing. "You're prrrretty, too, God. Pretty effective at making things happen."

She tucks his right arm, currently wedged under her leg, back into a place where men who yet have man-reactions wouldn't find it improperly placed. When Adelle DeWitt no longer gives a damn about propriety, Topher must make up the slack. He listens to her throat open and close, and politely doesn't tell her that if she wants to emit a glottal stop she shouldn't voice it.

Before the Accident with imprinting in Australia, before he accidentally spat his grape juice all over pod where more old-Topher should not intrude, there was a species known as the bowerbird. Topher tugs at a sheet of paper in his own bower. The placement of it is not right. It doesn't mirror the elegance of the human brain under duress, and that is all he wants to offer Adelle, seeing as the parts of his mind that used to churn out jokes and other romantic sacrifices are burning out on the roofs of Hollywood.

He reaches for the part of him that revels in scientific curiosity. Where does the impulse to gift to her come from? The peculiar amorphous structures most, ah, other people consider ethics makes no more sense to him, outside that part, than any of the engagements he once created love for. He does not want to feel that anywhere else. Only Adelle is rising again, because she has more important things to do than ensure he washes his hair ("At least he had done that dependably," he heard her say once, when she was far enough that only the very careless design of Dollhouse acoustics passed it to him) and listen to him babble about heroes and it wasn't his job to see Boyd coming and he once moonlighted as a civil engineer, so he is most qualified to build bowers. Before Adelle sung the Periodic Table Song to him whenever he woke up. That song has only the weakest tangential relationship to his work.

He looks at the paper and looks at her, standing so tall, now striding to whatever place is her own refuge, and wonders how much farther he has to decorate his bower in achievements to bring her back to normal.


End file.
